ELEGY (by Nikos Gatsos)

Some time God must have smiled at the fire inside your eye
The Spring must have clasped its heart like an ancestral seashore's pearl.
Now as you sleep shining
In the frozen fields where the wild grapevines
Turned into embalmed wings, marble pigeons,
Silent children of anticipation --
I wish you would arrive one evening like a tearful cloud,
Stone's vapor, olive's rime
For on your chaste forehead
Sometimes I would see
The snow of sheep and lilies
But you went through life like a tear of the sea
Like a Summer's shine and May's last rain
Despite of you too having once been one of her mauve waves
A bitter pebble of hers
A small swallow out of her into a desolate forest
With no bell's sound at dawn, no lantern's light at dusk
With your warm heart turned abroad
Toward the worn teeth of the alien seashore
Toward the wrecked isles of seals and wild cherry trees.